The Sugared Game - K.J. Charles Page 0,7

made a face. “I’m glad to see you well. How did you come to have a bookshop? I didn’t have you down as a reading man.”

Will gave a brief account of the miseries of his long unemployment, and the stroke of luck that had been reconciling with his long-estranged uncle. “He was delighted to see me. He was old and ill by then, and he’d never married. He gave me work, and said he’d teach me the trade, but then he fell sick.”

“That’s a shame.”

“It was. I wish I’d known him better. But I was there to look after him in his last days. And he left me everything.”

“I say!”

“Not that it’s untold riches,” Will hastened to add. “But the shop’s a going concern and he owned the building, so I’ve a secure roof over my head. I’m blasted lucky.”

“All right for some. Remember Captain Yoxall? He’s an earl now, lucky blighter. I wish I had a wealthy relative on his deathbed.”

Will wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Beaumont made a face. “Sorry, I’m sure you weren’t glad your uncle popped off. All the same, though—”

“I know what you meant,” Will assured him, rather than waiting for him to dig himself further into that hole. “What’s it like at the club?”

“Oh, I make ends meet. Awful hours, and the pay’s only adequate, but the tips are astonishing. Bring some American bootlegger or South African diamond nabob a bottle of sweet fizz, bow and scrape a bit, and he might leave a fiver on the table. Not what I thought I’d be doing after the war but needs must.”

“It seemed a bit of an odd place,” Will suggested.

“How’d you mean?”

“Well, I can’t say I took to that chap Fuller.”

“Oh, God, who would.” Beaumont gave a short laugh.

“And I went up to the top level and there were some pretty unsavoury characters there.”

“It’s a sink. A classy sink, one of the classiest, but there’s night-clubs and night-clubs, and the High-Low is definitely the latter, if you follow me. There’s two dope dealers who work alternating nights so the Smart Set can get their pick-me-up, and there’s always one East End gang or another sniffing around looking for trouble.”

“I saw some of them. Isn’t that a bit of a problem?”

Beaumont puffed out his cheeks. “Not so much now. Those chaps you saw are Wally Bunker’s lot, Mrs. Skyrme’s pet gangsters. She has them around because of last year. We had a pack of thugs descend on us, smashed up the place one Saturday, and swaggered in the next to demand drinks on the house all night if we didn’t want them to do it again. It’s a hazard of the business, but they didn’t reckon with Fuller. He had a set of his own thugs waiting for them and there was the devil of a scrap. He was wielding an iron bar, for God’s sake. Caught one chap and broke his arm in three places.”

“Are you serious?”

“Damned right. We didn’t have any more trouble out of them, and Mrs. Skyrme brought in Bunker and his pals as regulars so it didn’t happen again. Even she thought Fuller had gone overboard.”

“Sounds nasty.”

“He plays the smarmy floor manager well enough but he’s a mad dog when she lets him off the leash. I recall when he found out some scrap of a barman was pocketing change—a matter of shillings, but it took two of us to pull him off the poor little sod. Flanders was a rest cure by comparison. I must say, I envy your bookshop. It would be nice to have a bit of peace and quiet.”

Will agreed to this, rather than listing the multiple acts of violence that had taken place in or around his bookshop last year. Beaumont prodded unenthusiastically at his food. “So, that girl you were with, in the dress. Is that a serious sort of thing?”

“She’s not my girl. We’re just friends.”

“Oh. Why’s that?”

In part it was because Will had been down to his last shillings at the time things could have gone down that path, and by the time he was solvent enough to ask her out without losing his self-respect, their relationship had grown into a quite different shape. He didn’t feel like explaining that. “She’s the modern sort. Not interested in settling down. She’s starting her own business.”

“Good Lord. Do you ever have the feeling the whole world changed while we were away and nobody bothered to mention it to us?”

“All the time.”

“And it